R. Steven Page is 350 pages into the first book in his epic fantasy trilogy, his second novel. But that’s not what was on his laptop screen. The 47-year-old New Orleans native was looking for work as a fisherman on Craigslist.

“I just work it. I’m not trying to make a career out of it,” he said.

He’s doing that in the far tougher publishing field. His first novel is making the rounds. He’s also got a couple of screenplays under his fisherman’s belt. Hard is the life of a writer, though he gets some reprieve with regular visits to Preditors And Editors and Hollywood Lit Sales.

What’s a writer with his eyes on print publishing think of the chaotic, wide-open world of online writing?

“There are a lot of pros, but let me start with the cons,” he said. “For one, there’s phenomena like Wikipedia.” A publicly run encyclopedia. But can the public be trusted as much as an elite group of encyclopedia editors? Page says no.

But an author can only criticize the information overload so much. He’s had to look up everything from J.R.R. Tolkien’s history to Norse mythology as he’s researched his fantasy novel and creating the world it’s set in.

I asked if he Googled his characters’ names to make sure they didn’t exist. He nodded.

“One thing you learn doing that,” he said, “is that there’s nothing new under the sun.”

Looking up from the fishermen listings, Page tells me that though he’s been in Seattle 10 years, he’s almost ready to find another shore.

“When I got here, I could always smell the sea,” he said. “When I can’t smell the sea anymore, that’s when I know it’s time to go.”

Christine Coleman was also on Craigslist, also looking at another coast. The East Coast. The 26-year-old Colorado native is starting work on a nursing degree at Northeastern University in Boston in the fall, and she needs an apartment.

“Do you have any advice?” she asked me, a recent emigrant from the Atlantic. I had a little. But it seemed like she had a pretty good idea of what to look for.

Coleman is “not really a fan” of the Facebook and MySpace stuff and couldn’t think of any sites she liked to check out for fun. She was all business, a copy of “How To Go To College Almost for Free” sitting by her laptop. Her favorite scholarship search site: WiredScholar.com. I wished her luck.

Next was 28-year-old Katie Merry. The bookmarks on her Mac all had to do with biochemistry — her major at the University of Washington (check out BioMedCentral for the good stuff) — or e-mail. There was one link to Mahjong 2 at FreeArcade.com. “But I haven’t used that in months,” she said.

The upstate New York native (and Yankees fan. My latent Red Sox fandom surfaced for a moment, but subsided before I could do anything stupid) follows soccer online, particularly the English leagues. I asked which of all the issues surrounding the integration of the Internet into our society, she found most interesting. Her answer — the pace of that integration.

“You don’t notice an issue until it’s no longer an issue anymore,” she said. “It’s hard to go back.”

Thirty-year-old Matt Vivion carries his laptop around for when he wants to take a break from walking around the city — something he likes to do as often as possible. He checks the news, his e-mail, but again — nothing too distracting. Including blogs. He doesn’t get what the big deal is with those anyway.

“When you think about what a blog is, it’s a journal, on the Internet. There’s nothing new about that. ‘Blog’ is just a fun word to say,” he said. “I think we have to be careful with technology. Just ask yourself, what is it? What does it do?”

Thirty-three-year-old Manik Ahuja has one issue he thinks people shouldn’t be worried about — security. “Everybody’s too worried about identity theft,” he said. “There are plenty of other issues.”

He cited Wikipedia. Many people do. And the unofficial authority of blogs. The policy graduate student at UW uses the Net to keep in touch with family and friends. Again, no wasting time online for this guy. As for the popular stuff — who needs it?

“I don’t use MySpace because everybody uses it,” he said.

As an academic, he laments the loss of personal research. Everything is shared, he said. It takes away from the hunt for information. While many people are satisfied with Wikipedia, he uses Lexis Nexis and ProQuest to pull up professional journal articles.

So sue me. Free country. People can use the Internet however they’d like — well, with some obvious exceptions.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from months of bothering people at wi-fi coffee shops, it’s that our online behaviors vary from person to person as much as everything else.

I’ve run into reckless Net nuts and hopeless Luddites. Studious researchers and hard core gamers. Facebook freaks and MySpace maniacs — of all ages. You just can’t characterize what we do online and why.

But you can learn a lot about a person from where they browse — what they’re obsessed with and what they can’t stand. Where they spend their time and what they discover.

It’s been an unpredictable series, but I hope you enjoyed it. I know I’ll miss having an excuse to just find out — what the heck are these people doing on laptops all day? And I can’t guarantee that I won’t ask you one of these days, at one of these places.